In fairness, there are some fairly immense obstacles to getting a news site onto mobile. While there are some off-the-shelf solutions, generally site owners often need to go bespoke, and I’m pretty sure this is costly. Perhaps IT have a mobile strategy which is still in development (I must try to find out TBH).

Thanks for dropping by and commenting here.
Rgds
Richard

I found your post by searching after any hints about a mobile version of the irishtimes.com website. So far, I’ve had no luck in finding a proper mobile version which IMHO is quite odd.

How can a newspaper, the size of irishtimes.com, redesign and launch their online version in the year 2008 without a mobile version?

Or am I just too blind to see it?

How very convenient…

Thanks for commenting.

I just want to make a general point to anyone who wants to comment anonymously – very often I can track you back, and find a number of footprints via your IP. The internet is truly a wonderful thing, especially for tracing traffic.

I’m delighted people want to comment on my wee blog, but if they do have a vested interest it would be nice for them to state so.

Please note: this is a general comment and should not be construed to contain anything ‘between the lines’.

Best rgds
Richard

Anyone else finding navigating around their blogs near impossible? You can’t go from a blog post back to the blog homepage at all. Bizarre.

@Ken – I have no relationship whatsoever with IT. Other than meeting Ronan Murphy at IIA Congress (as mentioned in my previous post) and receiving the PR (same post BTW), I have had no contact whatsoever with IT prior to this post. When I met Ronan with a group of 12 individuals he discussed the project, and it was quite obvious that it was a major undertaking.

I have no intention of pitching anything to IT due to other client work. Not sure why you think I’m trying to ‘get into bed’ with them. The post was written to highlight what were, in my opinion, initial deficiencies with the new site.

And given that I have had chances to work with large clients, I also understand that deadlines have to be met, and sometimes that means a release which isn’t 100%. Do you honestly think that the work on this stopped when they released it? C’mon Ken, you know the deal here – you’re not wet around the ears.

I’ve written my opinion above, and I stick with the view that compared to where they were (ireland.com) and what I’m looking at today (irishtimes.com) they’ve done quite a good job. Feel free to write your opinions here or elsewhere if you disagree with my opinion, but please do both you and me a favour – leave your tinhat at the door before jumping to any more conclusions about my intentions.

Rgds
Richard

No disrespect but saying “I’m sure they’re working hard on fixing the glaringly obvious design flaws” in light of deserved criticism is a little suspect! The Irish Times did very little to improve MyHome.ie so why would this site be any different? Well, that’s not entirely true. They got Webfactory to redesign MyHome.ie as well but, for a €50m website, it’s extremely poor effort (whether that be Webfactory’s fault or The Irish Time’s fault for not committing enough budget – who knows).

Again, I’m not trying to rub anyone up the wrong way here but I really don’t think quality within the industry is going to improve if we’re busier trying to get into bed with the ‘big boys’ than we are showing them where they’re going wrong.

@Ken – Some interesting points there. Wonder if there aren’t some browser/os issues here? Agree on main nav. I imagine this is what was pushed out the door on release date, and we’ll see further refinements in the short term.

I imagine the IT folk are getting some decent feedback by now and will take notice of everything being said.

@both – thanks for dropping by.
Rgds
Richard

IrishTimes.com is quite poor from a design perspective.

* The header is cramped and main navigation isn’t nearly strongly defined enough.

* The right-hand column seems to have been poorly conceived as well although I can see they’re gearing up to have some ad space in there. Although it looks like they may be over-doing this – do the Irish Times really need this much intrusive advertising?

* The animated panels under the top 3 columns are jerky and the text hard to read.

* The grid in the columns under this are all over the place. The scrolling supplement marquee. It seems to indicate that there are 3 ‘pages’ although there are only really 2. I would recommend the developers have a shufty through the code and see what’s going wrong here.

* Near the bottom, where it has the ‘crossword’, ‘email’, ‘competitions’, etc. – maybe it’s just FF on Mac but the way the text starts to animate when you rollover the columns is really, really terrible.

Maybe I’m being over-critical but I would just expect a lot more from a site with this much financial backing behind it. A lot of the basic tenets of good, clean, functional design are missing here and I really don’t understand why it isn’t a lot better.

ireland.com – What can you say,,, to me this looks like a hackney’d rip of a mix roadrunner.com and bbc.co.uk and badly failing to meet anything like the quality of either site.

The last image has a slightly off-white background in both the active tab and the subnav.

There’s also one good reason why irishtimes.com shouldn’t be more lax – they have no history as the domain was just redirected. And I’ve noticed that Google is still returning ireland.com on searches for [irish times]. I think this is related to the page titles that were used.

I too like the ad placement – more conscious of users than revenue IMO.

Ever thought of using multiple profiles? You can have one non-ad profile for personal surfing, and another for work related stuff. All on the one install of Firefox

Rgds, and thanks for dropping by
Richard

I find when it comes to SEO and large sites like this, they can often afford to be a bit more lax since they have so much content and often so many inbound links that they often rank well – even if they use unconventional (non-best practice) techniques / methods.

I quite like the homepage layout myself. The columns are even and its a nice Grid layout. I’m hoping to learn more about Yahoo! CSS toolkit myself so i can achieve these kinds of layout using CSS and this is a good example of how neat those kind of layouts can look.

I like the fact also that they have placed the Ads in the right hand corner and not in the middle of article content (how long it will stay like that I don’t know), if its one thing I hate about the Internet, its the way advertisers are trying to force advertising in our faces. Popups / roll over flash / Epileptic triggering flashing items / Punch the monkey animations, the list goes on.

Unfortunately for me I work in the industry so can’t install ad blocker software – (not at work anyway) .

Good article.

@Lar – hadn’t tried manually navigating, good point. I think you’ll find a lot more stuff on the accessibility side, and they’ll likely be badgering away today and in the near future to fix/improve these things.

@Seb – my bad, and I updated the post to point to reflect this. Have to say though – I couldn’t see anything that pointed me at a blog when I visited earlier. Let’s just say there’s no prominent promos for the blogs.

@Cormac – yeah it is a bit restrained. You look at the herald.ie and it has some nice use of colour and layout to pull the eye and demark different elements/content areas. But of course at the end of the day it’s about the content. It would be interesting to contrast all the top newspaper sites from a design/usability.functionality perspective actually.

Rgds
Richard

Some of the text within the carousel is clipped too. Anything that wraps over three lines can’t be read (Safari).

In the refine search drop-downs for date you can choose to search between dates in the future! That’s an interesting feature! I wonder can I get next week’s Lotto numbers…

I’d also like to add to the navigation observations, when not using a mouse (i.e. a tab key), it’s impossible to see what link is focused on.

This has accessibility implications and is a really easy CSS fix.

Currently:
#pri-nav-news a:hover { color:#C00000; }

Could be improved with:
#pri-nav-news a:hover, #pri-nav-news a:active, #pri-nav-news a:focus { color:#C00000; }

Lar

Link fixed – thanks for that.

I didn’t look at the ALTs actually, but one thing I did think of was the main image of Mugabe is not a live link. A lot of people click on images, and given the main image’s prominance, I’m sure this will be the case here also.

Rgds
Richard

I would like to see the Irish Times starting to use ALT tags on their images, like the one of Robert Mugabe at them moment. And I’m not sure about the moving text when you hover over the subsections on Crossword/Email/Competitions.

Also the Most Read/Most emailed feature doesn’t currently work for me. But maybe that’s because you currently can’t email an article to a Friend.

Paul